NOPD consent decree to aim at profound, long-lasting change

Lt. Jim Brady winces when he thinks back to the scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Police Department a decade ago. Although the agency had previously weathered harsh scrutiny -- in the Rodney King beating, for instance -- this time was different. A group of elite cops was unmasked as drug-dealing, crime-minded gang members. The violation of the public trust was so great that the federal government placed the once-proud Police Department under U.S. oversight for eight years.

It was like a root canal, some said. The sort of thing no cop wants to go through.

But on a recent morning, Brady -- who investigates use of force by LAPD officers -- said he wishes the change had come sooner. Today, there are so many checks and balances, so many hoops to jump through, so many layers of oversight, that cops can't get away with things.

"If we did things the way we do now, we would have caught them," he said.

Over the next few months, a handful of New Orleans city attorneys and local and federal law enforcement officials will pound out a document that, like the one in Los Angeles, will profoundly change policing in this city. It's a fix imposed on only the most dysfunctional police departments, where rogue cops flourish in part because the systems in place for officers to police themselves are useless or nonexistent.

The end product is called a consent decree: an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and city officials that will lay out guidelines and impose restrictions that must be followed to right the wrongs of the New Orleans Police Department.

Historically, decrees have forced police departments to overhaul their policies and change the way they report crime, use force and address race and community relations. Officers are forced to police in ways that don't violate the rights of citizens, and they must document everything along the way.

Basis for reforms

The U.S. Department of Justice issued a 115-page report last March outlining what it sees as systemic problems within the NOPD. The findings will be the basis of the federal consent decree that city officials will soon begin negotiating.

The report concluded New Orleans police:

Use too much force against civilians, often don't report it and, when it is reported, too often fail to investigate the incidents thoroughly.

More than a dozen cities -- including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Los Angeles -- have gone through this process. Their experiences show that wholesale reform is hard and expensive, often costing millions for oversight, new technology and training.

Consent-decree veterans -- community activists, police and city officials -- say that to succeed, departments must shed their most deeply ingrained traditions and embrace change. How quickly the mandates are implemented, and how sincerely they are adopted, depends in large part on the person at the top: the chief. Civilian oversight also plays a key role in ensuring reforms stick over the long haul, police observers said.

"What we are looking for is fundamental culture change," Roy Austin, the attorney heading the U.S. Department of Justice probe of the NOPD said during a recent speech in New Orleans. "Meaning that every officer who comes on the force understands exactly what he or she is expected to do, exactly how they are to engage in constitutional policing, exactly how it is they are to interact with the public and the community."

The idea, Austin continued, is to foster change that is still in place 20 years from now. When the consent decree comes to a close, it's up to local leaders to make sure the department doesn't revert to its old ways.

This much is known: The order will be strict. Oversight may last a decade, which would make it one of the longest mandates of its kind. And an independent monitor will oversee the reforms, as will a federal judge who can impose penalties if the department fails to meet benchmarks.

In Cincinnati, the relationship between the independent monitor and police brass was sometimes strained, with monitor Saul Green complaining a couple years in that commanders refused to allow his staff to ride along with officers and tossed one of his employees out of police headquarters.

But in his final report, issued in 2008, Green concluded Cincinnati's makeover was "one of the most successful police reform efforts ever undertaken in this country."

Federal consent decrees over police departments were made possible by the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, which gave the Justice Department the power to sue agencies for a "pattern or practice" of civil rights violations by cops. Many civil rights advocates complained that the Bush administration grew unenthusiastic about these probes, particularly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Now, they're back. The Justice Department recently announced that it has 17 open probes of law enforcement departments, a record number.

New Orleans was one of the first cities to capture the attention of Obama's Justice Department. While Mayor Mitch Landrieu invited federal investigators to examine the department, many in the city believed they were coming anyway, spurred by the breathtaking police misconduct after Hurricane Katrina.

Some expect the New Orleans decree to reshape not just how the NOPD deals with bad behavior by cops, but also officers' day-to-day activities.

"If you really want to address accountability, you have to address what the police officers are doing out there on the street," said Samuel Walker, a Nebraska criminologist.

Decrees in departments as disparate as Los Angeles and Pittsburgh tend to zero in on the specific civil rights problem or problems that drew the Justice Department's attention.

Many agreements require more detailed reporting when an officer uses force -- for instance, when he hits a combative arrestee with a nightstick. In Pittsburgh, the first city to go under a decree, officers for the first time were required to fill out substantive reports after such incidents.

Thomas Streicher, the former Cincinnati police chief, said his city's consent decree transformed the way the department analyzed police shootings. Police began to look not only at whether they were justified in shooting, but whether officers could have used less-deadly tactics.

"Instead of creating a condition where police have to use force, create a condition that eradicates the need to use force," Streicher said.

When police received reports of an armed person, they began setting up a staging area to approach the suspect. A group of officers would then approach, giving police a psychological advantage, he said.

Many departments under consent decrees have created elaborate computer systems to warn supervisors when an officer has amassed a certain number of complaints, used too many sick days or been involved in repeated shootings. New Orleans created such a system in the 1990s, but it fell out of use before Hurricane Katrina. This same thing happened in Los Angeles, and the system's second incarnation cost tens of millions of dollars and was a key component in their decree.

In Pittsburgh, police supervisors meet four times a year to discuss troublesome officers, said Deputy Chief Paul Donaldson. "What we try to do is ... try to stop the problems before they happen," he said.

The reports by Cincinnati's monitor delved into the nitty-gritty of recent police interactions with civilians. Did police use pepper spray properly? Did police dogs bite too many people? What kind of internal investigations followed "takedowns" or use of Tasers? Each quarter, the monitor made an assessment.

New Orleanians should expect all of those changes and more. The Justice Department concluded NOPD officers too often use force, routinely fail to report it to supervisors and, when they do, are rarely investigated thoroughly.

And the Justice Department critique was broader, questioning the NOPD's core strategies. For instance, despite pledges to implement so-called "community policing," the report said, the NOPD prioritizes specialized units that focus on making arrests in "hot spots."

This emphasis suggests the New Orleans consent decree could borrow from Cincinnati's unique "collaborative agreement," a supplemental document signed by the city and community leaders that required the Police Department to implement certain community-policing strategies.

In a recent interview, Christy Lopez, one of the Justice Department lawyers who conducted the NOPD investigation, said trying to foster engagement between the department and community will be a goal of the decree. It will also be used as a barometer to measure the success of changes made by the NOPD.

"It's not just whether paragraph 100 to 150 were complied with and the Police Department has a policy, but what are we seeing on the street," Lopez said.

Austin cautioned that the consent decree in New Orleans will not be an exact mirror of any other.

"Keep in mind that we are taking a close look at those past consent decrees ourselves to see what worked and did not work," he said. "I think we are looking at ways to make the consent-decree process a better process."

Chief can make, break reform

Regardless of what shape the consent decree takes, observers agree that success is dependent on a police chief who embraces its implementation.

"If you have a leader who is not committed to it, who has it stuffed down his or her throat, who doesn't believe in it, who doesn't think it is necessary, it is going to be very difficult to get long-term results," said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied consent decrees. "On the other hand, if you have somebody who believes that change is necessary and is going to be helpful in making it, you have a chance to get some of it to work."

In Los Angeles, the police chief was a relative outsider: William Bratton, a superstar in the policing world, barreled into the troubled department not long after its consent decree was hammered out. To many in Los Angeles, Bratton's lack of local ties was a clear bonus, allowing him to diagnose problems his predecessors overlooked and shake things up quickly, without fear of offending old friends.

NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas is both insider and outsider. He is a product of the NOPD, an 21-year veteran who left for a decade to serve as the head of police departments in Washington state and Nashville, Tenn., before returning in 2010 to take the superintendent's post.

For his part, Serpas has defended his ability to reform the NOPD, saying he has acted as a "change agent" in every department he has led. He was the right-hand man of NOPD chief Richard Pennington, who launched numerous reforms in the 1990s during a period of improvement at NOPD.

Police observers in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh credited their police chiefs with embracing the reforms demanded by their respective consent decrees, although both chiefs were, like Serpas, products of their departments. In both cities, civil rights lawyers who led community efforts to expose unsavory practices by police eventually lauded the chiefs.

Scott Greenwood, a Cincinnati attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Streicher became a surprisingly reliable ally.

"Even if it was not evident in his early years he would become a reformer, he became a reformer," Greenwood said. "It gave him the framework he needed to transform the department."

Greenwood's counterpart in Pittsburgh also commended former chief Robert McNeilly, who took the reins of the Pittsburgh force just as the ACLU filed an explosive lawsuit saying scores of complaints about officers were never properly investigated.

McNeilly recalled the subsequent federal intervention as an opportunity to force city leaders to pour money into an antiquated department. It also helped him subvert powerful police union heads who had balked at immediately implementing proposed changes.

"When Justice came in, I didn't realize my initiatives would be included," McNeilly said. "Once I read it and saw my initiatives in there, I understood this was the way I could get things done."

Lasting change?

Given that the first consent decree was imposed just 14 years ago, questions remain about whether the changes they force are lasting.

In Detroit, a decree initiated in 2003 is still ongoing and has been beset by numerous setbacks and scandals. In Oakland, Calif., the police chief recently quit and blamed local bureaucracy for the agency's failings. Initially set for a five-year period, the Oakland decree is now entering its ninth year. The judge overseeing the reforms has threatened federal receivership.

The key to avoiding such pitfalls, by most accounts, is to meet the decree's requirements on the front end and, after the decree expires, to keep aggressive monitoring in place.

In that respect, New Orleans may be ahead of the game, with an independent police monitor's office well under way. But the Justice Department has already raised questions about whether the agency has the resources or the "latitude" to handle its work.

The monitor, Susan Hutson, recently told the City Council that she needs to triple the size of her four-person staff to meet the duties as outlined by city ordinance.

Hutson expects her office will take on an increased role once the decree is in place, and it will try to keep the department from backsliding once federal oversight is lifted.

"At the end of the day, we at the Department of Justice parachute in and then leave," federal attorney Austin noted in his recent speech. "We are not here to stay and we shouldn't be here to stay."